Settlements with a sting

Hard-nosed City solicitors have a well-earned reputation for being tough negotiators, but compared to Kirsten Mander, general counsel of Australia's Smorgon Steel Group, they are cuddly teddy bears - and the boardrooms of Western Europe have nothing on some of the world's more dangerous locations.

Making her maiden speech as a new council member of the Law Institute of Victoria, Ms Mander recalled her time in-house at Western Mining Corporation.

'Increasingly my work became focused internationally,' she said, 'negotiating acquisitions in the Philippines (where negotiators sometimes rolled hand grenades around the table to encourage settlement), in China (you try negotiating Central Bank gold policy while eating fried scorpions) and most recently in the former Soviet Union, where they blew up the building I had been negotiating in - although I did not take this personally.' Rumours that scorpions are to be added to the menu at Herbert Smith's in-house canteen are, we are assured, totally false.